Using video to peak interest: A sneak preview/promo into your greater story

With video currently being the most information dense media available on the Internet, it is a great way to capture interest from your viewers. To do this however, you must be able to peak and maintain viewer interest throughout the course of your video. While high-quality video and a strong promotional strategy will help peak viewer interest, your efforts will not be nearly as effective if you do not correctly identify your target market. By clearly outlining all aspects of your target audience, you have a well defined group to direct your efforts towards and thus enhance the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

In order to make your brand resonate with your target audience, it is important to understand who your target audience actually is. A great way to do this is to focus on the demographic profile of your target market. Understand their gender, culture, age, income, and geographic location. The more comprehensively you understand the demographic aspects of your target market, the better your ability to infer what they derive value in. While demographics alone do not by any means give you the full picture of your target consumer, they do provide an excellent framework with which to begin directing your marketing efforts. It is from this framework that you can further infer aspects of the target consumer’s life and identify their needs.

Once you have a holistic picture of your target market’s demographic profile, it is time to identify their needs. As the purpose of all products and services can be most fundamentally reduced to satisfying consumer needs, it is important that you identify the needs of your target market. This makes your actual marketing more effective as you can very specifically target these needs and effectively communicate how are your product can remedy them.

Now that you have created robust consumer profiles and understand the needs of your target consumer, it is now time to choose the channels through which you deploy your media. While nearly all consumers incorporate some aspect of video media into their lives, it is important to understand what specific sources your target user gets their video media from. For example, you could have a highly effective video that deliver substantial value to your target audience, but if your target market consists of high tech entrepreneurs in their early 20s, you will have little success launching your video on cable television.

For this reason it is important to analyze various social media channels and which demographic groups more frequently use said social media channels. By choosing channels that your target audience spends most of their on, you are increasing the likelihood that a member of your target market will view your video. Depending on a variety of factors such as how much money you are willing to put into your marketing strategy and the extent to which private research is needed, it may be wise to conduct a consumer survey or hired a marketing research agency to increase your ability to market on the most relevant media channels.

Once you have painted a picture of your target consumer, you must launch your marketing strategy and see how successful you were at identifying the target market. The best way to improve the definition of your target market is to go through this iterative process every time you launch new advertisements. By analyzing the successes and failures of each advertisement launch, you begin to develop a better understanding of your target consumer’s identify.

Now that we’ve covered the process of how to identify the target market, it is important to now focus on how to create videos that deliver maximum value to the target consumer.

What is most important is that your video identifies the pains associated with the target market’s needs and how are your product can resolve those pains. Easier said than done, there are many properties of your video that you must consider in order to efficiently deliver all necessary information in a captivating way.

To begin, your video can essentially be broken up into three key parts: the introduction, the body, and the call to action. It is vital that consumer retention be maintained throughout all three parts as it is the call to action that translates to your company’s success.

Within the first 10 seconds of the video, about 20% of viewers click away. After one minute has eclipsed, approximately 45% of viewers click away from the video. This trend continues as the video grows longer. Therefore, in these first few seconds you must give the viewer a reason why they should keep watching through the body of the video.

Once you have successfully enticed to the viewer to keep watching, your video must continue to deliver value until you get to the call to action – in other words, the point where your marketing efforts can potentially translate to a sale or follow-up from the consumer. Unfortunately, due to declining viewer attention span, it is no longer enough to simply identify your target market’s needs and present a remedy to the problem. It has now become a strategic necessity to deliver this information in a highly captivating way. Even if you are delivering high-quality information, if you are not doing so in a way that captures the consumer’s attention, you risk the consumer clicking away and pursuing another alternative.

Two great ways to ensure that you maintain your audience’s attention are to change various aspects of your video such as audio, animations, and speakers as well as incorporate emotional aspects to your video marketing strategy. By following these practices, you are not only breaking up the monotony of what would otherwise be a relatively stagnant viewing experience, but are also increasing the probability that your video will resonate emotionally with the viewer.

Lastly, it is paramount that your video has a very clear call to action once you have delivered all relevant information to the consumer. As a best practice, your website should never be more than one click away from the video that the consumer just watched. By making the process of transitioning between the end of your video and your website where the consumer can make a purchase as seamless as possible, you are increasing the likelihood that the consumer will actually go through with the purchase.

By successfully identifying your target market and providing high-quality video that delivers a value to the target consumer, you’re increasing the likelihood that your video will peak customer interest and to translate to a follow-up request or purchase from the consumer.